by Laird Barron
The palace of cries where the doors are opened with blood and sorrow. The secret graveyard of the elephants. The bones of elephants made a forest of ribcages and tusks, dry riverbeds of skulls. Red ants crawled in trains along the petrified spines of behemoths and trailed into the black caverns of empty sockets. Oh, what the lost expeditions might’ve told the world!
She’d dreamt of the Elephants’ Graveyard off and on since the funeral and wasn’t certain why she had grown so morbidly preoccupied with the legend. Bleak mythology had interested her when she was young and vital and untouched by the twin melanomas of wisdom and grief. Now, such morose contemplation invoked a primordial dread and answered nothing. The central mystery of her was impenetrable to casual methods. Delving beneath the surface smacked of finality, of doom.
Danni chose to endure the fugue, to welcome it as a reliable adversary. The state seldom lasted more than a few minutes, and admittedly it was frightening, certainly dangerous; nonetheless, she was never one to live in a cage. In many ways the dementia and its umbra of pure terror, its visceral chaos, provided the masochistic rush she craved these days—a badge of courage, the martyr’s brand. The fugue hid her in its shadow, like a sheltering wing.
May 6, 2006
(D. L. Session 33)
Danni stared at the table while Dr. Green pressed a button and the wheels of the recorder began to turn. His chair creaked as he leaned back. He stated his name, Danni’s name, the date and location.
—How are things this week? He said.
Danni set a slim metal tin on the table and flicked it open with her left hand. She removed a cigarette and lighted it. She used matches because she’d lost the fancy lighter Merrill got her as a birthday gift. She exhaled, shook the match dead.
—For a while, I thought I was getting better, she said in a raw voice.
—You don’t think you’re improving? Dr. Green said.
—Sometimes I wake up and nothing seems real; it’s all a movie set, a humdrum version of This Is Your Life! I stare at the ceiling and can’t shake this sense I’m an imposter.
—Everybody feels that way, Dr. Green said. His dark hands rested on a clipboard. His hands were creased and notched with the onset of middle age; the cuffs of his starched lab coat had gone yellow at the seams. He was married; he wore a simple ring and he never stared at her breasts. Happily married, or a consummate professional, or she was nothing special. A frosted window rose high and narrow over his shoulder like the painted window of a monastery. Pallid light shone at the corners of his angular glasses, the shiny edges of the clipboard, a piece of the bare plastic table, the sunken tiles of the floor. The tiles were dented and scratched and bumpy. Fine cracks spread like tendrils. Against the far walls were cabinets and shelves and several rickety beds with thin rails and large, black wheels.
The hospital was an ancient place and smelled of mold and sickness beneath the buckets of bleach she knew the custodians poured forth every evening. This had been a sanitarium. People with tuberculosis had gathered here to die in the long, shabby wards. Workers loaded the bodies into furnaces and burned them. There were chutes for the corpses on all of the upper floors. The doors of the chutes were made of dull, gray metal with big handles that reminded her of the handles on the flour and sugar bins in her mother’s pantry.
Danni smoked and stared at the ceramic ashtray centered exactly between them, inches from a box of tissues. The ashtray was black. Cinders smoldered in its belly. The hospital was “no smoking,” but that never came up during their weekly conversations. After the first session of him watching her drop the ashes into her coat pocket, the ashtray had appeared. Occasionally she tapped her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and watched the smoke coil tighter and tighter until it imploded the way a demolished building collapses into itself after the charges go off.
Dr. Green said, —Did you take the bus or did you walk?
—Today? I walked.
Dr. Green wrote something on the clipboard with a heavy golden pen. —Good. You stopped to visit your friend at the market, I see.
Danni glanced at her cigarette where it fumed between her second and third fingers.
—Did I mention that? My Friday rounds?
—Yes. When we first met. He tapped a thick, manila folder bound in a heavy-duty rubber band. The folder contained Danni’s records and transfer papers from the original admitting institute on the East Coast. Additionally, there was a collection of nearly unrecognizable photos of her in hospital gowns and bathrobes. In several shots an anonymous attendant pushed her in a wheelchair against a blurry backdrop of trees and concrete walls.
—Oh.
—You mentioned going back to work. Any progress?
—No. Merrill wants me to. She thinks I need to reintegrate professionally, that it might fix my problem, Danni said, smiling slightly as she pictured her friend’s well-meaning harangues. Merrill spoke quickly, in the cadence of a native Bostonian who would always be a Bostonian no matter where she might find herself. A lit major, she’d also gone through an art-junkie phase during grad school, which had wrecked her first marriage and introduced her to many a disreputable character as could be found haunting the finer galleries and museums. One of said characters became ex-husband the second and engendered a profound and abiding disillusionment with the fine-arts scene entirely. Currently, she made an exemplary copy editor at a rather important monthly journal.
—What do you think?
—I liked being a scientist. I liked to study insects, liked tracking their brief, frenetic little lives. I know how important they are, how integral, essential to the ecosystem. Hell, they outnumber humans trillions to one. But, oh my, it’s so damned easy to feel like a god when you’ve got an ant twitching in your forceps. You think that’s how God feels when He’s got one of us under His thumb?
—I couldn’t say.
—Me neither. Danni dragged heavily and squinted. —Maybe I’ll sell Bibles door to door. My uncle sold encyclopedias when I was a little girl.
Dr. Green picked up the clipboard. —Well. Any episodes—fainting, dizziness, disorientation? Anything of that nature?
She smoked in silence for nearly half a minute. —I got confused about where I was the other day. She closed her eyes. The recollection of those bad moments threatened her equilibrium. —I was walking to Yang’s grocery. It’s about three blocks from the apartments. I got lost for a few minutes.
—A few minutes.
—Yeah. I wasn’t timing it, sorry.
—No, that’s fine. Go on.
—It was like before. I didn’t recognize any of the buildings. I was in a foreign city and couldn’t remember what I was doing there. Someone tried to talk to me, to help me—an old lady. But, I ran from her instead. Danni swallowed the faint bitterness, the dumb memory of nausea and terror.
—Why? Why did you run?
—Because when the fugue comes, when I get confused and forget where I am, people frighten me. Their faces don’t seem real. Their faces are rubbery and inhuman. I thought the old lady was wearing a mask, that she was hiding something. So I ran. By the time I regained my senses, I was near the park. Kids were staring at me.
—Then?
—Then what? I yelled at them for staring. They took off.
—What did you want at Yang’s?
—What?
—You said you were shopping. For what?
—I don’t recall. Beets. Grapes. A giant zucchini. I don’t know.
—You’ve been taking your medication, I presume. Drugs, alcohol?
—No drugs. Okay, a joint occasionally. A few shots here and there. Merrill wants to unwind on the weekends. She drinks me under the table—Johnny Walkers and Manhattans. Tequila if she’s seducing one of the rugged types. Depends where we are. She’d known Merrill since forever. Historically, Danni was the strong one, the one who saw Merrill through two bad marriages, a career collapse and bouts of deep clinical depression. Funny how life tended to put the shoe on the
other foot when one least expected.
—Do you visit many different places?
Danni shrugged. —I don’t—oh, the Candy Apple. Harpo’s. That hole-in-the-wall on Decker and Gedding, the Red Jack. All sorts of places. Merrill picks; says it’s therapy.
—Sex?
Danni shook her head. —That doesn’t mean I’m loyal.
—Loyal to whom?
—I’ve been noticing men and… I feel like I’m betraying Virgil. Soiling our memories. It’s stupid, sure. Merrill thinks I’m crazy.
—What do you think?
—I try not to, Doc.
—Yet, the past is with you. You carry it everywhere. Like a millstone, if you’ll pardon the cliché.
Danni frowned. —I’m not sure what you mean—
—Yes, you are.
She smoked and looked away from his eyes. She’d arranged a mini gallery of snapshots of Virgil and Keith on the bureau in her bedroom, stuffed more photos in her wallet and fixed one of Keith as a baby on a keychain. She’d built a modest shrine of baseball ticket stubs, Virgil’s moldy fishing hat, his car keys, though the car was long gone, business cards, cancelled checks, and torn up Christmas wrapping. It was sick.
—Memories have their place, of course, Dr. Green said. —But you’ve got to be careful. Live in the past too long and it consumes you. You can’t use fidelity as a crutch. Not forever.
—I’m not planning on forever, Danni said.
August 2, 2006
Color and symmetry were among Danni’s current preoccupations. Yellow squash, orange baby carrots, an axis of green peas on a china plate; the alignment of complementary elements surgically precise upon the starched white table-cloth—cloth white and neat as the hard white fabric of a hospital sheet.
Their apartment was a narrow box stacked high in a cylinder of similar boxes. The window sashes were blue. All of them a filmy, ephemeral blue like the dust on the wings of a blue emperor butterfly; blue over every window in every cramped room. Blue as dead salmon, blue as ice. Blue shadows darkened the edge of the table, rippled over Danni’s untouched meal, its meticulously arrayed components. The vegetables glowed with subdued radioactivity. Her fingers curled around the fork; the veins in her hand ran like blue-black tributaries to her fingertips, ran like cold iron wires. Balanced on a windowsill was her ant farm, its inhabitants scurrying about the business of industry in microcosm of the looming cityscape. Merrill hated the ants and Danni expected her friend to poison them in a fit of revulsion and pique. Merrill wasn’t naturally maternal and her scant reservoir of kindly nurture was readily exhausted on her housemate.
Danni set the fork upon a napkin, red gone black as sackcloth in the beautiful gloom, and moved to the terrace door, reaching automatically for her cigarettes as she went. She kept them in the left breast pocket of her jacket alongside a pack of matches from the Candy Apple.
The light that came through the glass and blue gauze was muted and heavy even at midday. Outside the sliding door was a terrace and a rail; beyond the rail, a gulf. Damp breaths of air were coarse with smog, tar, and pigeon shit. Eight stories yawned below the wobbly terrace to the dark brick square. Ninety-six feet to the fountain, the flagpole, two rusty benches, and Piccolo Street where winos with homemade drums, harmonicas, and flutes composed their symphonies and dirges.
Danni smoked on the terrace to keep the peace with Merrill, straight-edge Merrill, whose poison of choice was Zinfandel and fast men in nice suits, rather than tobacco. Danni smoked Turkish cigarettes that came in a tin she bought at the wharf market from a Nepalese expat named Mahan. Mahan sold coffee too, in shiny black packages; and decorative knives with tassels depending from brass handles.
Danni leaned on the swaying rail and lighted the next to the last cigarette in her tin and smoked as the sky clotted between the gaps of rooftops, the copses of wires and antennas, the static snarl of uprooted birds like black bits of paper ash turning in the Pacific breeze. A man stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. He craned his neck to seek her out from amidst the jigsaw of fire escapes and balconies. He waved and then turned away and crossed the street with an unmistakably familiar stride, and was gone.
When her cigarette was done, she flicked the butt into the empty planter, one of several terra cotta pots piled around the corroding barbeque. She lighted her remaining cigarette and smoked it slowly, made it last until the sky went opaque and the city lights began to float here and there in the murk, bubbles of iridescent gas rising against the leaden tide of night. Then she went inside and sat very still while her colony of ants scrabbled in the dark.
May 6, 2006
(D. L. Session 33)
Danni’s cigarette was out; the tin empty. She began to fidget. —Do you believe in ghosts, Doctor?
—Absolutely. Dr. Green knocked his ring on the table and gestured at the hoary walls. —Look around. Haunted, I’d say.
—Really?
Dr. Green seemed quite serious. He set aside the clipboard, distancing himself from the record. —Why not. My grandfather was a missionary. He lived in the Congo for several years, set up a clinic out there. Everybody believed in ghosts—including my grandfather. There was no choice.
Danni laughed. —Well, it’s settled. I’m a faithless bitch. And I’m being haunted as just desserts.
—Why do you say that?
—I went home with this guy a few weeks ago. Nice guy, a graphic designer. I was pretty drunk and he was pretty persuasive.
Dr. Green plucked a pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his white coat, shook one loose and handed it to her. They leaned toward one another, across the table, and he lighted her cigarette with a silvery Zippo.
—Nothing happened, she said. —It was very innocent, actually.
But that was a lie by omission, was it not? What would the good doctor think of her if she confessed her impulses to grasp a man, any man, as a point of fact, and throw him down and fuck him senseless, and refrained only because she was too frightened of the possibilities? Her cheeks stung and she exhaled fiercely to conceal her shame.
—We had some drinks and called it a night. I still felt bad, dirty, somehow. Riding the bus home, I saw Virgil. It wasn’t him; he had Virgil’s build and kind of slouched, holding onto one of those straps. Didn’t even come close once I got a decent look at him. But for a second, my heart froze. Danni lifted her gaze from the ashtray. —Time for more pills, huh?
—Well, a case of mistaken identity doesn’t qualify as a delusion.
Danni smiled darkly.
—You didn’t get on the plane and you lived. Simple. Dr. Green spoke with supreme confidence.
—Is it? Simple, I mean.
—Have you experienced more of these episodes—mistaking strangers for Virgil? Or your son?
—Yeah. The man on the bus, that tepid phantom of her husband, had been the fifth incident of mistaken identity during the previous three weeks. The incidents were growing frequent; each apparition more convincing than the last. Then there were the items she’d occasionally found around the apartment—Virgil’s lost wedding ring gleaming at the bottom of a pitcher of water; a trail of dried rose petals leading from the bathroom to her bed; one of Keith’s crayon masterpieces fixed by magnet on the refrigerator; each of these artifacts ephemeral as dew, transitory as drifting spider thread; they dissolved and left no traces of their existence. That very morning she’d glimpsed Virgil’s bomber jacket slung over the back of a chair. A sunbeam illuminated it momentarily, dispersed it amongst the moving shadows of clouds and undulating curtains.
—Why didn’t you mention this sooner?
—It didn’t scare me before.
—There are many possibilities. I hazard what we’re dealing with is survivor’s guilt, Dr. Green said. —This guilt is a perfectly normal aspect of the grieving process.
Dr. Green had never brought up the guilt association before, but she always knew it lurked in the wings, waiting to be sprung in the third act. The books all talked abou
t it. Danni made a noise of disgust and rolled her eyes to hide the sudden urge to cry.
—Go on, Dr. Green said.
Danni pretended to rub smoke from her eye. —There isn’t any more.
—Certainly there is. There’s always another rock to look beneath. Why don’t you tell me about the vineyards. Does this have anything to do with the Lagerstätte?
She opened her mouth and closed it. She stared, her fear and anger tightening screws within the pit of her stomach. —You’ve spoken to Merrill? Goddamn her.
—She hoped you’d get around to it, eventually. But you haven’t and it seems important. Don’t worry—she volunteered the information. Of course I would never reveal the nature of our conversations. Trust in that.
—It’s not a good thing to talk about, Danni said. —I stopped thinking about it.
—Why?
She regarded her cigarette. Norma, poor departed Norma whispered in her ear, Do you want to press your eye against the keyhole of a secret room? Do you want to see where the elephants have gone to die?
—Because there are some things you can’t take back. Shake hands with an ineffable enigma and it knows you. It has you, if it wants.
Dr. Green waited, his hand poised over a brown folder she hadn’t noticed before. The folder was stamped in red block letters she couldn’t quite read, although she suspected asylum was at least a portion.
—I wish to understand, he said. —We’re not going anywhere.
—Fuck it, she said. A sense of terrible satisfaction and relief caused her to smile again. —Confession is good for the soul, right?
August 9, 2006
In the middle of dressing to meet Merrill at the market by the wharf when she got off work, Danni opened the closet and inhaled a whiff of damp, moldering air and then screamed into her fist. Several withered corpses hung from the rack amid her cheery blouses and conservative suit jackets. They were scarcely more than yellowed sacks of skin. None of the desiccated, sagging faces were recognizable; the shade and texture of cured squash, each was further distorted by warps and wrinkles of dry-cleaning bags. She recoiled and sat on the bed and chewed her fingers until a passing cloud blocked the sun and the closet went dark.